Employee outlook for Ms Access & VBA

[GBalcom]

Not sure if this is the place to post this or not.....but I'd like to ask a general question, so here it is...

How much of your job is spent working in Access or other database software? What type of role do you have with your firm? Is your firm Large or small?....

I've spent a lot of time in the past 6-9 months learning all I can about Access....Now I'm learning all I can about VBA with the help of this forum and some great books.....

The question I'm starting to ask myself is if it's worthwhile....

I really like doing this stuff and wouldn't mind doing it full-time at some point...I just don't know if that is common....

I'm not against learning another language, but I'm already in my mid-30's, and there are a lot of people coming out of school that would know much more than me I'm sure.

Thanks for any insight....

 

[Lightwave]

Access is a brilliant start to developing an excellent understanding of programming and designing environments it can also be used as an end in itself. It will teach you about all aspects of normalization , effiicent writing of queries and linking to powerful SQL datbases.

Any knowledge you learn about Access and visual basic will be directly transferrable to environments such as C# & C++.

It's sweet spot is unique smallish desktop departmental solutions so if you are looking for rolls and jobs (at least initially) your probably looking at smallish departments which can be within big or small companies. With practice you will be able to provide solutions for large departments however typically IT will ring fence these projects and go with different technologies. Irrespective the way you normalise those projects will be exactly the same as you would if you were designing an access database.

The majority of places that you work will only give you the Access IDE unless you are specifically employed in a pure IT or engineering roll it is unlikely that you wil be given an appropriate IDE such as Visual Studio or Qt Creator (a C++ gui design IDE). They will also probably want people with computer science degree backgrounds unless you have shown exceptional previous example works for these rolls.

Even if you can get granted the permissions for Visual Studio or Qt it is very likely that for business intelligence tools you will be far more productive in Access.

Use access for the specific task that you are intersted in and it will prove very useful. Maybe learn another language to hit their particular sweet spots. C# is not particularly different from VB but there isn't a datbase IDE out there that really uses it and C++ really is aimed at a very different more engineering based focus think running cross platform applications and you are almost never likely to get a job in this arena unless you are just totally exceptional or you are going into pure engineering.

Although not directly employed by IT nearly all my work is now associated with access.

 

[GBalcom]

Pat,
Thank you very much for your post on the forum...Its nice to hear from someone with your experience. My career to date has revolved out of woodworking. I started on the shop floor, then drawings, project management, etc. I've also led a few software implementations, so that experience must count for something. It appears that you have your own business as a consultant. I'm seriously considering making databases for others part time. I have a few more questions for you if you don't mind answering them.
Are businesses that hire you typically large? It seems building a database at the going rate is a serious investment that a smaller company may not be able to handle.
In your opinion, what is the best way to get started with such a venture?
I've done a few databases where I work that are single purpose, to help departments pull more information out of our SQL databases, or to fill in the blanks....Is this more typical than a full application?

Thanks for your advice in this matter.